U.S. Budget problem

What it functionally did was to raise the price of used cars by providing a solid price floor. Not good news for the poor.

A brighter future for a darker age.

Yeah, a piece of crap oil-burning mobile wreck of a car needs to be off the road. However, the Clunkers policy only was applicable for cars 25 years old or newer. Those old 1970's shambling wrecks I still see here marking their turf wherever they park? Not applicable, still driving today.

But when people are killing late nineties luxury cars....? Seriously, if you don't want that thing, I'm sure someone would love to buy it for 4500 dollars, and you can put that 4500 towards that new car you want, without restriction.

^ Precisely my point earlier. Plus, less used cars running around that need replacement parts, so the parts stores see less business. More about used car prices here, and how they went up. And are still going up. Yep, sure to help those who only make minimum wage.

Our disposable society just irritates me sometimes.

edited 28th Apr '11 3:19:50 PM by pvtnum11

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

If they wanted to clean up the environment, they could start with black-smoke-spewing school buses, but that's probably a different fight.

A brighter future for a darker age.

My district use LPG for our school buses when I was in school. Not sure what they have here in Hawaii, though.

edited 28th Apr '11 3:17:59 PM by pvtnum11

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

Yeah, the black smoke is from Diesel, I wouldn't mind phasing more of them out too.

But yeah, the Cash for Clunkers program wasn't mean to help the poor. If you want a program for that, i've got some ideas, including better public transportation, especially cross-country.

Public transportation would be a good investment. Better if it was well-planned and all that stuff, but that ties into city planning and things.

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

There's one big problem, the absurdly huge amount of rural area and rural population to cover. Sure greater than 50% of the US population lives in cities, but what about the other 100 million who live in minor cities, small towns and out in the country?

How do you make a reliable bus stop for commutes when in some towns you might pick up less than a dozen passengers a day? How do you make accessible rail commuting when the nearest railway tracks go out of their way to stay out of town? That happens a lot in the West. If you aren't historically known for rail travel, the railroad lines go out of their way to avoid you. Partly due to government ordinances concerning noise and traffic. Then there's the fact a fuckton of towns simply don't have nearby rail access to begin with. (Almost 2/3 of the state of Colorado does not have nearby railroad lines, the majority of existing lines are either connected to transcontinental rail systems or old historical routes to mining towns like Cripple Creek.)

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

That's irrelevant, if the urban population weren't wasting so much on cars, the country as a whole would be better off for whatever lifestyle they're interested in. Especially the rural states, since they're net liabilities anyway.

In the end, you're probably right, since single-payer would probably slash healthcare spending in half. Even so, digging and filling ditches is stupid, and the sooner we fix it the better.

As I opined above, the enormous tax hikes for the rich needed to rein in the deficit would present a significant stumbling block to such efforts.

Definitely, the value of labor has absolutely imploded since the '70s. Imagine the trillions in such stolen profits heading back to their rightful owners.

Zombie cars cost so much more in societal liability this is actually a good thing in the end. That said, the rate at which most people buy new cars is ridiculous, and most of the problem can be put down to people taking lousy care of cars. If there were strong incentives for maintenance, that would probably do far more good for far less money.

Eric,

US rail systems transported over 1 billion passengers by rail back in the 20s.

I think we can manage something of the sort today.

Besides, the real problem most people have is...we either drive, fly, or nothing.

edited 28th Apr '11 4:02:03 PM by blueharp

Our country is way too car happy. It makes someone like me, who has a fear of driving, sad.

I know its impossible but America needs a scale down like what some are wanting for Detroit (shrink the city down, bring people closer into nicer homes, etc)

Also as someone from Michigan, I can tell Cash for Clunkers helped out the struggling car industry BIG TIME.

They were on the brink of destruction, or at least GM was. And now I'm reading good news all around, factories are being opened now, all that fun jazz.

It's a real problem that will have to be tackled eventually. My guess is that you'll see subsidized gas for rural residents, but that's just my (cynical) opinion.

Democracy is the process in which we determine the government that we deserve

Didn't Obama state he wanted to have more support for public transit and rails?

I'd get behind that.

I was just thinking about this, could there be a smaller rail system between small towns and bigger towns? you would need to figure out where the mass of people went to work to get it right, but that's easy. to get between towns you would go to the larger city first, save for towns in a linear arrangement. So, for instance, to get from Brown Deer, WI to Port Washington, WI, would be one train since they both run along I-94. But for Port Washington to Germantown, which don't have a direct highway connection, would involve a trip through Milwaukee, the nearest city.

Or does this plan need a rethink?

Very big Daydream Believer. "That's not knowledge, that's a crapshoot!" -Al Murray "Welcome to QI" -Stephen Fry

The US did that already. They were called "Interurbans" and their heyday was from the late 19th century through about 1930, after which greater availability of private cars, as well as delivery trucks for businesses, slowly killed them off. They started going bankrupt from about 1930 onward, with the last survivors mostly dying in the 1950s. A couple of systems survive as part of metropolitan transit systems; Chicago's South Shore Line being one, LA MTA's Blue Line being another (it's the last surviving remnant of the Pacific Electric).

A brighter future for a darker age.

Obama did indeed push for rail and other public land transit, but it's so hard to get that through in today's political climate he had to include almost double the public transport funds' amount in additional highway funding, local governments are also pushing on this issue. Hopefully things will proceed, but every day spent without ground broken on construction is another chance the projects will all be killed off again as in past decades.

Eric,

Just to tie it into Wisconsin's problems, Wisconsin was one of the states to receive funding for a rail system, but our great leader, Scott Walker, tried to divert the funds to making new roads instead of A) using the money to repair the deteriorating inner-city roads and town roads around the state, or B) Using the money to make a train system between Milwaukee and Madison, the two biggest cities and the locations of multiple colleges, schools, and most of all University of Madison, one of the top schools in the world. As a result, the money went to New York, and a bunch of other legislative problems are occurring, as anyone who has been listening to the Madison protests will know.

Very big Daydream Believer. "That's not knowledge, that's a crapshoot!" -Al Murray "Welcome to QI" -Stephen Fry

I would've liked it if Ewa Beach had gotten a leg on the Oahu transit plan, but they axed it.

It takes a long time to get out of Ewa Beach in the morning (and into it in the evening), as it's pretty much a bedroom community, and continuing to grow. Not too bad getting into it during the morning route, though. A rail system to Pearl City and Honolulu would help a bunch.

The rail system they're going to build will only link up Kapolei to Honolulu (with some stops along the route). Better than nothing, but it'll be pretty expensive. H-3 cost gobs for only ten miles worth of freeway, although they did have to tunnel through a mountainside.

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

This actually isn't as big of a problem. The black smoke is (mostly) particulate carbon, which falls to the ground fairly quickly and is ingested back into the environment very quickly compared to CO₂. IIRC what my design professor said.

Fight smart, not fair.

I've heard that particulates are locally bad, though, and bother those with breathing difficulties, even if they settle relatively soon. Not going to make big differences to the global climate or anything, but they're a shorter-lived quality of life issue.

I'm not exactly sure why school buses (especially the rounded Crown buses) are so smoky, though. Poor maintenance? Also, they have their exhaust pipes at car-window height.

But this is going a touch off-topic, I think ;)

A brighter future for a darker age.

Having lived in Kapolei for a while, I greeted the idea of a rail extension there VERY favorably, the drive to Honolulu is like LA or something.

Eric,

It strikes me that Hawaii is especially suitable to mass transit, too, having a fairly high population density and crowded roads.

A brighter future for a darker age.

^ And low geographic area. Don't forget that.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

I loathe trips into Honolulu. Crap, even a quick trip into Pearl City frazzles my nerves.

I'd still like a tunnel under the harbor so the Ewa Beach folks can drive to Honolulu in less than twenty minutes, that'll nuke the H-1 traffic a LOT.

^^^ Doesn't help we get a lot of Mainland drivers who treat the roads here like they're still on the Mainland.

Favorite bumper sticker: SLOW DOWN, this isn't the Mainland.

edited 28th Apr '11 7:33:46 PM by pvtnum11

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

That too, though it kind of goes with "high population density" most times. Island Hawaii is a completely different animal when it comes to land use and transportation than most of the rest of the US.

A brighter future for a darker age.

We got some federal money for the rail project, I forget how much. Something like half of what was needed or something. But we need more transportation funds for bridge repairs and resurfacing. They've pushed back the ten-year resurfacing schedule to something like 14 years, and the roads here are utter crap because of it. There was some Federal transportation study they did and we ranked really badly on it. If we coudl get some Federal money steered our way to rectify that, it would help a lot.

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.